This article is an extension of my previous PXE Boot Environment Setup on RHEL/CentOS 7 and it’s focused on how you can perform Automatic Installations of RHEL/CentOS 7, without the need for user intervention, on headless machines using a Kickstart file read from a local FTP server.

The environment preparation for this kind of installation has already been processed on the previous tutorial regarding PXE Server setup, the only key missing, a Kickstart file, will be discussed further on this tutorial.

Multiple RHEL/CemtOS 7 Installation using Kickstart

The simplest way to create a customize Kickstart file that you can use it further for multiple installations is to manually perform an installation of RHEL/CentOS 7 and copy, after installation process finishes, the file named anaconda-ks.cfg, that resides in /root path, to an accessible network location, and specify the initrd boot parameter inst.ks=protocol://path/to/kickstart.fileto PXE Menu Configuration File.

Requirements

This tutorial, and the Kickstart file configuration, only covers the Minimal Installation of RHEL/CentOS 7 without a Graphical Installation, basically the Kikstart file resulted from the previous Minimal Installation procedure of RHEL/CentOS 7.

If you need a Kickstart file that covers GUI Installation and a specific partition table, I suggest that you first perform a customizable
Graphical Installation of RHEL/CentOS 7 in a virtualized environment and use that resulted Kickstart file for future GUI installations.

3. Before attempting to use this file for installations procedures, it is important that you verify the file using ksvalidator command included on Pykickstart package, especially if manual customizations had been performed. Install Pykickstart package and verify your Kickstart file by issuing the following commands.

# yum install pykickstart
# ksvalidator /var/ftp/pub/anaconda-ks.cfg

Install Pykickstart Package

Verify Kickstart Files

4. The last verification is to assure that Kickstart file is accessible from your specified network location – in this case FTP Local Mirror Installation Source defined by following URL Address.

ftp://192.168.1.25/pub/

Verify FTP Mirror

Step 2: Add Kikstart Installation Label to PXE Server Configuration

5. In order to access Automatic Installation of RHEL/CentOS 7 option from PXE Menu add the following label to PXE default file configuration.

As you can see from this example the automatically installation can be supervised via VNC with password (replace VNC password accordingly) and the Kickstart file is located locally on PXE server and is specified by the initrd boot parameter inst.ks= FTP network location (replace protocol and network location accordingly if you are using other installation methods such as HTTP, HTTPS, NFS or remote Installation Sources and Kickstart files).

6. To automatically install RHEL/CentOS 7 and supervise the entire installation process, especially on headless servers, instruct your client machine from BIOS
to boot from network, wait a few seconds then press F8 and Enter keys, then select Kickstart option from PXE menu.

PXE Boot Menu

7. After the kernel and ramdisk loads and detects the Kickstart file, the installation process automatically starts without any intervention from user side needed. If you want to watch the installation process connect with a VNC client from a different computer using the address that the installer provides you and enjoy the view.

Automatic OS Installation

Connect to VNC

Kickstart Automatic OS Installation

8. After the installation process finishes login to the newly installed system with root account and the password used on previous installation (the
one that you copied the Kickstart file) and change your client root password by running passwd command.

Connect to New Installed Server

That’s all! Automatic Kickstart installations offer a great deal of benefits for system administrators in environments that they have to perform system installations on multiple machines the same time, in a short period of time, without the need to manually interfere with the installation process.

If You Appreciate What We Do Here On TecMint, You Should Consider:

TecMint is the fastest growing and most trusted community site for any kind of Linux Articles, Guides and Books on the web. Millions of people visit TecMint! to search or browse the thousands of published articles available FREELY to all.

If you like what you are reading, please consider buying us a coffee ( or 2 ) as a token of appreciation.

15 Responses

Hello, I did this and my install continues to pause at the for me to confirm that there will be no user created and to confirm the EULA. I’ve added the line eula –accepted to my KS file but it still stops and asks me to finish configuration. Is there a way to get it to just continue past that screen?

You wont need to worry about this if you use a kickstart file form a previous installation. The License terms are accepted automatically.
Still, if you should now this parameter for manually created kickstart files:
eula Accepted

You don’t actually need FAI to automate the install of Debian-based or Debian-derived distros. Ubuntu, Debian, Kali Linux, etc. all support pre-seed files. FAI is a great tool no question but not strictly necessary. You can get by with just preseeds, TFTP, and DHCP and a network bootstrap like iPXE or pxelinux. FAI is kind of a wrapper/abstraction layer between the complexities of deriving your own preseed semantics and intelligence. Hand-coding preseed files for diverse deployments and ongoing management/maintenance of those files is onerous but for occasional one-off type stuff it’s fine.

When you want to try scale deployments enterprise tools like FAI, Cobbler (on the RHEL/CentOS side), Satellite, and several similar solutions all permit large-scale management of server deployments, be they virtual or physical.

The setup of the PXE server would be the same, but instead of creating a Kickstart file and a YUM repository, you would create a Debian mirror and an answer file, as described at http://fai-project.org/fai-guide/.